that might not have been true. I’ve never been good at guessing heights or weights. I never knew I’d have to be.
He offered me a can of Sprite and a plastic-wrapped sandwich, like the kind you’d buy at a gas station. I didn’t take them. I kept my arms around my legs, which were pulled in toward my chest, and I made my gaze as sharp as a blade.
“Who are you?” I demanded.
He leaned down to set the meal on the mattress, and I scooted back as his fingers got close to my foot. I registered then that I was still wearing the kitten heels I’d put on for the party. My dress had a smear of dirt on the hem, but otherwise it was white as a christening gown. I’d been too stunned to put up a fight as he covered my mouth and injected me with a drug, so the delicate lace remained unsnagged. When he came for me, scouring my quiet neighborhood—looking, I’m sure, for someone as stupid and careless as me—I flopped into his arms like a swooning damsel. He was probably disappointed at how easy it all had been.
“Who are you?” I asked again, but he straightened up, looked down at me through the tinted screen of the mask, and he didn’t answer.
“What are you going to do with me?” I tried.
When he spoke, his voice was not one I recognized—but then again, it was muffled by plastic.
“I don’t know yet,” he said. “But definitely something.”
And that’s when I screamed. Not because I was scared of him, exactly, but because I was deeply and consumingly angry. And yes, terrified. Of course I was terrified. I was fourteen years old, chained to a metal ring on a concrete floor, wearing a dress that would take almost nothing to tear. I thought about torture and rape. I thought about all the girls I’d ever heard of who had disappeared, only to be found, years later, as bones in a makeshift grave.
Mostly, though, I screamed because I was burning with a red-hot rage that would set me on fire if I didn’t get it out. I screamed because I hadn’t screamed when I’d heard the car pull up behind me. I screamed because I’d done this to myself, and the anger I felt—in that moment at least—was for me alone. I had left the party, even knowing that to do so would horrify and humiliate my parents. I had wanted to horrify them. I had wanted them to stammer and shrug to their friends as they tried to explain where I had gone. I’d wanted to sully the perfect sheen of their massive spectacle, the Confirmation party that was more for them than it ever was for me.
My throat became raw with screaming, but the discomfort was something I believed I deserved. I had made my promises to God. I had committed myself to his teachings and commandments. But I did not honor my mother and father. And he had seen fit to punish me. I was Eve eating the forbidden apple, only to discover that I was naked and vulnerable. I was banished from Paradise, given a dirty basement instead of a big house with walls that would protect me.
The man was not moved by the noise I made. He watched me for a while, head tilted, and I thought that maybe, at some point, I even heard him laugh. Then, apparently bored with me, he turned around and climbed the stairs, closed the door at the top, and bolted a lock.
I stopped screaming. And then slowly I shut my eyes. And then, yes, I’ll admit it, I’ll say it here in black and white: I curled into a ball and I cried.
* * *
Despite all the TV interviews and Dateline specials, all the bloggers who still publish anniversary stories about my case, there isn’t a lot to say about the time I spent alone in that basement.
The masked man came twice a day. The bolt clicked, the red door opened, a flash of daylight flooded the stairs. He always brought me a sandwich and Sprite—which, after that initial offering, I couldn’t help but devour—and at the end of each day, a change of clothes: sweatpants, a T-shirt, a zip-up hoodie. He took my waste bucket and promptly returned it.
Most of the time, he never said a word, not even when I yelled at him to tell me who he was, why he’d chosen me. The second